4. feb. 2015

The Croatian website Vox Feminae published my essay on the Slovene - and international - zine scene of the late 1990's. It would have never been written without Jane Graham's invitation. Jane, the author of amazing zines Shag Stamp, Hickey and Floozy, edited an anthology on grrrls' zines and our involvement in the punk scene. Unfortunately, the book never came out. Maybe some day it will. In the meantime, here's my ...

I became aware of the existence of zines around 1993, when one of the Slovenian local music zines, Rock Vibe managed to get regular distribution. It was sold in every kiosk, or newsstand, right next to Bravo. Bravo
was a music biweekly from Germany that included stickers and posters of
New Kids on the Block, Roxette, 2 Unlimited, Guns’n’Roses, and other
teen idols.

Until we got our hands on Rock Vibe, my best friend and I considered ourselves lucky if we managed to catch a glimpse of any "alternative" band in Bravo
and would then try to convince the schoolmate who bought it to rip out
that quarter of a page for us. It didn’t matter that we couldn't
understand a word of German – the pictures were far more stimulating
anyway. So, until Rock Vibe suggested new escape routes, I fled
the dull reality of my tiny village by pretending Eddie Vedder was my
brother, indulging in Second World War novels, and keeping sighing diary
notes about my endless crushes. In the meantime, my more progressive
friend fled her misery by listening to heavy metal, writing poetry, and
holding séances with picture book Native Americans.

I didn't spend much time quizzing over what the word zine
might possibly mean. The fact it represented something obscure was
enough to get me interested. I ordered the first zine listed in Rock Vibe's review section through the mail and received 13. Brat along with an illegible letter and a bunch of flyers advertising other zines. Those flyers, and 13. brat's
review section sealed my fate, so to speak, for many years to come.
Both zines came from Nova Gorica, a border town between Slovenia and
Italy where, lucky me, my dearest blood relatives lived as well. As a
kid, I had spent many summer holidays at their place. They lived on the
ninth floor of a 14-storey block of flats and I remember being
fascinated by the balcony view. One of the things you could see if you
leaned over the balcony was, of course, the downstairs neighbours'
balcony. There was a white chalk drawing of a circled A sign on one of
the dark red walls. To me, it looked like a promise of a different
world, one that lurked just beneath my feet. Imagine my surprise when I
first checked 13. brat and realized that one of the zinesters
lived in that block. It didn’t take me long to figure out he actually
lived – downstairs.

I want to be your friend, too

And so, my family grew. At the time, Nova Gorica had a pretty active
hardcore and punk scene. Concerts were the meeting place and since I got
to know zines together with hardcore music, I accepted the whole
package. In effect, I wrote with and hung out with guys only. Not that
it bothered me; I considered myself a boy anyway and couldn’t have cared
less about girls. It took me years to start wondering why I didn't have
any girl friends, why there were so few girls around, why I knew only
one or two girl zinesters, and why I choose to identify with boys in the
first place. At the time, I was more preoccupied with fitting into the
boys' club. It seemed the only logical thing to do. Needless to say, the
irony of the zine’s title escaped me completely – in English, 13. Brat translates as The 13th Brother.

In my view, I had encountered a wonderful community that encouraged
my sense of belonging to a chosen, rather than given system of values
and ideas. My identification with the scene was further encouraged by
the fact that zines were such a well-kept secret that practically nobody
outside the scene knew what they were. Zines were available from their
authors or from small distributions only. You could order them through
mail, buy them at concerts, exchange them in squats and youth clubs,
borrow them from friends or the anarchist library in Ljubljana – and
that was it. It was certainly fine with me. Zines were my secret place
and I wasn't prepared to let in just anybody, most definitely not some
random postman.

Once, when I received yet another badly wrapped package of
zines from this or that country, I noticed a tiny handwritten note in
the corner of the parcel. In Slovene it said: "I want to be your friend,
too." It infuriated me: not because I thought I was being stalked, but
because whoever had written that had trespassed upon my secret.

It was only inevitable I would eventually start writing my own zine. I released the first issue of Pssst…
in 1997. The timing was excellent, since those were the most prolific
years of the local zine scene. Petra Kolmančič documented the Slovenian
scene of the 1990s in her study Fanzini (2001) and claimed that
between 1995 and 1997, up to twenty zines came out at least once per
year. They were mostly preoccupied with punk and anarchism, so art zines
like Petra's Sirota Jerica were a most precious exception. My
own work fitted the category of personal zines, or "perzines" rather
well since it consisted of obnoxious rants that viewed – and judged –
all issues from my limited perspective.

I was 17 then and excited about moving to the capital. In Ljubljana, I
would study literature and sociology; I would finally be able to meet
other zinesters in person and get the chance to participate in the
scene. The most exciting part of it all was that I was going to live on
my own and become financially independent. As unlikely as it sounds, I
became financially less dependent on my parents because of zines. That
is, I received a scholarship for "artistically talented pupils" once it
dawned on me that zines could be viewed and "sold" as proof of my
creativity. When I eventually submitted a thick envelope of zines and
flyers to the scholarship commission, I was grinning from ear to ear. In
my mind, this was pure subversion. Was it really possible to disguise
my attacks on the educational system as "creative writing"? Was it
possible that the very system I was criticizing was going to encourage
me to continue doing the same?

It was: after all, this was capitalism. Of course, those texts look
pretty harmless today, even if they must have been a real nuisance to
read. Moralistic and affected, they were the scribbles of a teenage
mutant who believed the Earth was dominated by hypocrisy - whereas she,
naturally, came from an ethically superior planet. I thought the rule of
moral majority was best represented by a drawing published in my
Belgian pen friends' zine Tilt. It showed a million smiling
Nazis standing under a banner, proclaiming: "A MILLION HAPPY PEOPLE
CAN'T BE WRONG". I am no longer sure if the people on that image were
really defined ideologically. I probably turned them into Nazis myself
in order to simplify the point. Either way, integration was not an
option and I attacked "hypocrisy" with a passionate and destructive
frankness. I was one big exclamation mark yet I must have sensed that I
would have to radically compromise my "honesty" as soon as I took other
people's opinions into account, for I stubbornly avoided doing it.

Social experiments

Instead, I preferred to describe specific people in abstract ways and
frequently discovered universal truths in highly volatile bodies. It
was about shyness, too. For instance, when I wanted to try out something
new, I couldn’t do it unless I disguised it as a "social experiment".
Eventually, in order to test my "patience", I tried to see whether I
could learn to listen to other people’s rants as well. I went to the
local old folks’ home and, strictly in the name of science, asked a
nurse whether there was someone there who didn’t receive any visits but
wouldn’t mind chatting with a total stranger. She told me to go see an
eighty-year-old lady called Marija. "She's interesting to talk to," she
said, "although she is quite forgetful, and complains of her age
problems a lot." I was pleased. If the lady kept telling the same story,
that meant I would have to be really attentive or I would miss all the
variations.

I visited Marija regularly for the next two months and learned that
the variations were… slight. Time stood still in that room. Every time I
came, she was laying on her bed, resting. She always wore the same navy
blue dress with large brown flower prints. She complained about her
rheumatism and her snoring roommate but preferred to talk about her
family, especially about her beautiful young grand-daughter. My visits
must have been a painful reminder of her absence. They were embarrassing
too, since Marija remembered neither my name neither "whose I was", as
she put it when she wanted to know who my family was. I talked about my
kid brother, my parents, my grandparents. At the same time, I thought
about my other family, the zine community, since those were the siblings
who would soon read about the findings of my experiment.

Pssst... #2, Sp. Idrija, cca. 1999

In the second issue of Pssst..., they could learn that my
listening abilities were very poor, largely because I was "too selfish"
and "too bored" with the old lady. I never went to see her again and
continued to conduct my research among my peers. Funnily enough, it
never occurred to me that I was already practicing the art of dialogue
by reading, writing, and exchanging zines. They were the perfect medium
for articulating ideas and learning to respond to other people's writing
because they took time to make, took time to reach about one or two
hundred people through "snail mail" and people took time to respond. In
theory, and contrary to the possibility of instant publishing today,
they encouraged reflective, rather than affective writing.

Not that I practiced reflective writing. At 17, the
prevailing feeling was that of emergency, combined with my complete
identification with the scene. I was part of a transnational community
that connected me to hundreds of local scenes. In my euphoric moments, I
believed I was participating in a revolutionary movement, and the fact
that it recognised writing and self-publishing as legitimate forms of
resistance was almost too good to be true. So I plunged…

I wrote most of my "public diaries" in English because I wanted my
foreign pen friends to be able to read them. I managed to photocopy the
first fifty copies for free in my school. A hundred copies of the
following issue were sponsored equally by the local students'
organisation and my mum. When the number of copies increased to two
hundred, I had to start using every free or cheap copying possibility I
could find. I made several covers by hand and got high on spray paint in
my mum's cellar when I stencilled a hundred covers for Pssst… no. 2.

I cut my increasing postage costs by using the old zinester trick: I
coated the stamps with paper glue or soap and asked the addressee to
send them back. Nearly everybody did it. It was both a gesture of
solidarity and a guarantee that sooner or later new zines would come my
way together with my fading stamps. I ended up corresponding with people
from all over former Yugoslavia, Western Europe, parts of Eastern
Europe and North America, even Chile, Argentina, the Philippines and
Malaysia. The evidence – boxes of zines, books, letters, photos, post
cards, even teabags and toys – is still gathering dust in my
grandmother's attic.

Almost too good to be true

In the beginning, my international zine exchange was limited to
Western Europe and North America. I wondered why it was much harder to
find zines from post-socialist countries and other capitalist
peripheries yet, at the time, I figured there were either no zine scenes
there or they were nationally bounded, so zines were probably written
in languages I couldn't understand. It did not occur to me that the
accessibility of Western zines had more to do with Western economic and
cultural domination; that, as in other fields of culture, one had to
make an effort to reach non-Western scenes. Since the latter should have
felt closer to my world in all respects, I often wondered why I wasn’t
motivated to make that effort. I think that, like so many other people, I
idealized Western European and North American communities: I saw them
as more creative, more radical, and more exciting.

My first trip to Western Europe turned out to be a very
sobering experience. Yes, that world was richer and more varied, but it
was also moving at a frenzied paste and obsessed with purchasable
identities, making human contact a somewhat less heartfelt and more
instrumental experience. It was indeed sobering to realize that the zine
scene was part of it. When I came home, I felt like I had seen our
future. Since the fall of socialism in the East and the fall of social
states in the West raised neo-liberal capitalism from the dead, it had
to happen, there was no choice: soon enough, Slovenia – and perhaps the
whole post-socialist region – would look and feel exactly the same. In
fact, with the loss of social security and solidarity that was thrown
away along with socialism, the situation ended up being even worse for
most people.

Still, I never experienced Western cultural influences as an
ideological intrusion upon my world. I grew up with them. Moreover, the
local zine scene of the mid 1990s was strong and creative enough that it
did not have to accept everything that came from the West. Actually, I
don’t think there were any significant differences between Eastern and
Western scenes. In the case of Slovenia, the only difference might have
been that older zinesters maintained their connections with their
colleagues from former Yugoslavia. For them, that was the most important
frame of reference, both before and after the war. For me, it became
important much later. In 1991, when it looked like the war was going to
break out in Slovenia, I was 11 years old and too young to grasp the
full meaning of the forthcoming tragedy. School was off for the summer
and I have just gotten my first brand new mountain bike. All I could
feel was anger; I knew I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike once the war
started for real. It didn’t, at least not for me. Instead, in 1992, it
moved to Croatia and then on to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where there were
a lot of kids who couldn’t ride their bikes.

Sirota Jerica #2, Petra Kolmančič, Ormož, 1997

In 1997, I went to the second zine gathering in Maribor. The
organizers wanted to bring together zinesters from all Yugoslav
successor states, but in the end only about six of us showed up, all
locals. People from Croatia, not to mention those coming from other
states, had neither the money nor the necessary papers to join us. I was
disappointed because I was hoping to meet zinesters from Croatia and
Serbia who had just recently become my pen pals.

Only when NATO started bombing Serbia in 1999, I realized that our
friendships and zine collaborations were political per se: they were a
protest against nationalism, against wars. During the bombing, a friend
from Belgrade phoned me almost every evening. He said he needed to talk
to somebody who had nothing to do with this madness. So we cracked
jokes, gossiped, talked about all the exciting things we wanted to try,
all the cool places we wanted to visit.

When I hung up, I looked at the sky and thought of NATO
airplanes that rose from the American air base in Aviano. They crossed
Slovenia on their way to Belgrade and I realized I was very much
involved in the madness. The maddening part was that our friendships
couldn’t stop it.

I moved to Ljubljana for my studies in 1998 and started volunteering
for the anarchist library and the women’s festival. I also started
working as a journalist for Radio Študent, wrote for other independent
media, and joined the editorial team of a satirical monthly. Suddenly, I
was making friends in real time and space, and learned to appreciate
their vicinity. Distant friendships became painful to maintain and I
stopped writing those long, pondering letters, especially after I
started using e-mail, got the chance to travel and met some of my best
pen friends in person. I fell in love in all sorts of places, too. By
the time I realized I missed the charm of handwriting as well as the
contemplative nature of old-fashioned letters, I was already too busy
doing other things and lost my interest in zines.

Hickey, Jane Shag Stamp, Sheffield, 1996

After reading, making, exchanging and distributing zines for four
years, I became disturbed by the scene’s limitations. The zine culture I
knew was obsessed with a predictable array of topics, namely music,
comics, anarchism, squatting, drugs, tattooing, sex, feminism,
self-sustainability, and animal rights. Since most of us recycled the
same pro et contra arguments, the discussions became boring. Also, I was
disturbed by the increasing number of straight edge and other similar
zinesters who propagated their lifestyles in very arrogant ways. I
remember receiving a sticker that said ‘x I AM BETTER THAN YOU x’ and
tossing it where it belonged – into the trash.

On the other hand, many zines corresponded with my growing
interest in fiction, feminisms and queer politics. They were a
subculture within a subculture, one that helped me accept my body, my
sexuality, and my changing identities. Most of the people whom I still
meet at various festivals and conferences belonged to that scene. It is
inspiring to see that they found other media to suit their needs, and
that many former zine-makers, to different degrees, still aspire to the
principles of doing-it-yourself.

Whether it is individual acts of resistance or collectively organized
protests, whether it is art projects or self-managed communities,
whether it is raising children or dreaming through days and nights, all
of these things are, in my view, re-envisioning and transforming society
– and us. This is one of the most precious lessons I learned in the
zine scene. For that, I am thankful to all the zine-makers who brought
me up, and grew up with me.

A Small Shimmer of Things, Kara Sievewright, Maker of Nets Press, Vancouver, 2003

Biography
Tea Hvala (1980) is a writer, translator and journalist from Cerkno,
Slovenia. She published her first zine in 1997 and has been writing and
(self)publishing ever since. She co-organized the Ljubljana-based
feminist and queer festival Rdeče zore (Red Dawns) between 2001 and 2013, and ran a series of workshops on collaborative writing of feminist-queer science fiction In Other Wor(l)ds between 2007 and 2013. She co-authored and edited two anthologies: Rdečke razsajajo (KUD Mreža, 2010) and Svetovi drugih (KUD Anarhiv, 2011). Currently, she is the co-author of Sektor Ž, the only feminist radio show in Slovenia.

My interview with performer, writer and HYSTERIA editor Bjørk Grue Lidin is coming out in the next issue of Maska.In August 2018, I'll be learning about dance dramaturgy in Bassano dal Grappa, Italy, as part of the Performing Gender - Dance Makes Differences project.